Haim Yacobi
Biographic Data
| ID | 325309 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Haim Yacobi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Haim |
| FAMILY NAME | Yacobi |
| SIGNATURE | YACOBI H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ben-Gurion University of the Negev |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0758-8594 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 445 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Community perspectives on the built environment, community stress, and the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular diseases in Accra, Ghana
The growing burden of diabetes and other non-communicable diseases in Africa demands greater understanding of the contextual drivers of risk factors, including the built environment. Cognitive Mapping (CM) is a participatory research approach that allows community members to visualise their environmental context through drawing. The maps express in visual form the situated knowledge of the environment from local perceptions of daily experiences. …
Contextual awareness, response and evaluation (Care) of diabetes in poor urban communities in Ghana: The Care diabetes project qualitative study protocol
Diabetes remains a major, global clinical and public health threat with consistent rises in prevalence around the world over the past four decades. Two-thirds of the projected increases in global diabetes prevalence to 2045 are expected to come from low- and middle-income countries, including those in sub-Saharan Africa. Ghana is typical of this trend. However, there are gaps in evidence regarding the appropriate development of interventions and …
Decolonisation, gentrification, and the settler-colonial city: Reappropriation and new forms of urban exclusion in Israel
Focusing on the immigration of upper-middle-class Palestinian families to the Israeli town of Upper-Nazareth, originally built by the state to enhance Jewish presence in the area, this paper frames the concept of decolonising gentrification. Accordingly, it studies a unique inconsistency between economic class and ethnonational hegemony, which enables upwardly Arab minority families to overcome ethnic barriers and to exercise social and spatial m…
The biogeopolitics of cities: A critical enquiry across Jerusalem, Phnom Penh, Toronto
Dwelling on a disciplinary threshold between urban planning and urban health, we take a comparative historical perspective on the urban development of three cities – Jerusalem, Phnom Penh and Toronto – highlighting how the evolution of their socio-spatial fabrics has been shaped by decisively biopolitical approaches. In line with current studies, we remark how the will to control the cities’ territories and populations has intertwined with policy…
Zionism in a white coat: Israel’s geopolitics of medical aid development assistance of health to Africa
This article focuses on Israel’s export of medical knowledge to African states during the 1960s. Its aims are twofold. First, to evaluate and discuss the place of medical assistance and health aid within scholarship, examining the relationships between Israel and African states. Second, it will show how a discussion of Israel’s medical and health projects are linked to the regional geopolitics that shape the movement of materials, individuals and…
Planning, Land Ownership, and Settler Colonialism in Israel/Palestine
This article discusses the challenges that the settlement process poses to Israeli property regimes, examining the ways that public apparatuses, specifically those related to urban planning, are creatively mobilized to address and mitigate such challenges. The article focuses on two case studies: the Palestinian village of Kamanneh in the Upper Galilee and the Ganey Aviv neighborhood of Lydda, one of Israel’s so-called mixed cities. Based on thes…
Introduction: Infrastructural stigma and urban vulnerability
In this introduction to the Special Issue ‘Infrastructural Stigma and Urban Vulnerability’, we outline the need to join up debates on infrastructural exclusion on the one hand and urban stigma on the other. We argue that doing so will allow us to develop a better understanding of the co-constitutive relationship between the material and the symbolic structures of the city shaping urban exclusion and vulnerability. Positing that stigma is not mere…
Beyond ‘causes of causes’: Health, stigma and the settler colonial urban territory in the Negev/Naqab
This article critically analyses and theoretically conceptualises the links between settler colonialism, planning and health. Based on the case of the Bedouin community in the Negev/Naqab, we argue that the production of settler colonial space has a profound impact on health, and should therefore be referred to as a specific category for analysing health disparities, simultaneously entangling territorial control and biopolitics towards indigenous…
Technopolitics, development and the colonial-postcolonial nexus: Revisiting settlements development aid from Israel to Africa
This article focuses on the interrelationship between colonial development in Israel and the export of knowledge and practices to Africa. We argue that at the core of the Israeli aid project to Africa is the Cold War and the global technopolitics of this era, that is, the use of technological methods and practices to achieve political ends. The main question to be discussed throughout this article is whether the Zionist settlement enterprise and …
Routledge Handbook on Middle East Cities
The urban geopolitics of neighboring: Conflict, encounter and class in Jerusalem’s settlement/neighborhood
This article examines a unique, yet paradigmatic, case study of a colonial neighborhood in East Jerusalem that is undergoing a significant demographic transformation.1 The French Hill neighborhood, built in 1971, was one of the first settlements in East Jerusalem. Initially, it was populated primarily by upper-middle class secular-Jewish residents. This group has been steadily diminishing as two other distinct new groups moved into the neighborho…
The geo-biographies of spatial knowledge: Regional planning from Israel to Sierra Leone and back
Constructing a Sense of Place: Architecture and the Zionist Discourse
Contents: Introduction: Whose order, whose planning?, Haim Yacobi. Part I: Reshaping Terra Nullius: Contested Zionism - alternative modernism: Erich Mendelsohn and the Tel Aviv Chug in mandate Palestine, Alona Nitzan-Shiftan The flight of the camel: the Levant fair of 1934 and the creation of a situated modernism, Sigal Davidi Kunda and Robert Oxman Mold, Zvi Efrat Horizontal ideology, vertical version: Oscar Niemeyer and Israel's height dilemma,…
Spaces of sovereignty: A tale of an unrecognized Palestinian village in Israel
This article discusses the spatial and political dimensions of an unrecognized Arab village in Israel, which is a subject of houses demolition during the last decade, taking part in parallel to a legal struggle for recognition. This case is part of a wide political act in Israel, where Palestinians are rendered ‘criminal’ and their spaces illegitimate. We will suggest that the unrecognized villages cannot be seen solely as a product of planning p…
Neo-settler colonialism and the re-formation of territory: Privatization and nationalization in Israel
In this article we critically analyse the production of Israeli territory vis a vis the ongoing transformation of land and planning policies from ones based on pure nationalism to those purporting neo-liberal logic. Unlike the existing literature − including the most recent critical body of knowledge on planning, resource management and public policy in Israel − we contend that this transformation must be understood within the framework of settle…
From 'Ethnocracity' to Urban Apartheid: A View from Jerusalem\al-Quds
In the core of this article stands an argument that while ethnocracy was a relevant analytical framework for understanding the urban dynamics of Jerusalem\al-Quds up until two decades ago, this is no longer the case. As this article demonstrates, ver the past twenty years or so, the city's geopolitical balance and its means of demographic control, as well as an intensifying militarization and a growing use of state violence, have transformed the …
Israel and Africa: A genealogy of moral geography
Jerusalem: From a ‘divided’ to a ‘contested’ city—and next to a neo-apartheid city
‘We, the sons and daughters of this land, are opening our doors, walking out into the streets and taking up positions in town plazas to declare: We are here.We are here to oppose evil, hatred and v
Politics, infrastructure and representation: The case of Jerusalem’s Light Rail
The Arab village: A genealogy of (post)colonial imagination
This article critically discusses the image and the imagining of the Arab village produced by two cultures, the national-Zionist from the 1930s onwards, and the national-Palestinian during the last decade. Unlike fellow theorists and researchers, we are reluctant to be satisfied with the claim that throughout history the Jews, establishing their identity vis-à-vis the rural and oriental ‘other’, perceived the Arab village in an inversely mirrored…
The Geopolitics of Neighbourhood: Jerusalem’s Colonial Space Revisited
This article will focus on an ongoing process of Jerusalem's contested urban space during the last decade namely the immigration of Palestinians, mostly Israeli citizens, to "satellite neighbourhoods", i.e. Jerusalem's colonial neighbourhoods that were constructed after 1967. Theoretically, this paper attempts to discuss neighbourhood planning in contested cities within the framework of geopolitics. In more details, we will focus on the relevance…
Culture Capital for All’? Cultural Diversity Policy in Tel Aviv and its Limits
This article critically analyses cultural diversity policy in Tel Aviv–Jaffa in relation to non-Jewish labour migrant communities and to Palestinian citizens of Israel residing in Jaffa. It focuses on recent incorporation of cultural diversity into city policy in its 'City Vision' and 'Global City' initiatives and in three specific areas (festivities, libraries and museum of city history). The article argues that despite the introduction and init…
Rethinking Cities in Contentious Times: The Mobilisation of Urban Dissent in the ‘Arab Spring’
Throughout history, cities have been the theatre of social and spatial struggles. The issue of urban protests, however, has not yet been investigated in detail in the light of the growing concern of the need to rethink urban studies, from theoretical and epistemic assumptions, to methodological issues. It is argued that the mobilisation of urban dissent in the so-called Arab Spring offers a good opportunity to develop a critical approach based on…
God, Globalization, and Geopolitics: On West Jerusalem's Gated Communities
Over the last two decades West Jerusalem's city centre has undergone wide-scale privatization of space which is expressed, for instance, in the extensive construction of gated-community housing compounds. This is a global process which can be seen in many cities where neoliberal policies are implemented, resulting in the expansion of the elite's private capital on the one hand and the weakening of the welfare state as part of globalization proces…
Rethinking Israeli Space: Periphery and Identity
© 2011 Erez Tzfadia and Haim Yacobi. This book sheds light on the production of Israeli space and the politics of Jewish and Arab cities. The authors’ postcolonial approach deals with the notion of periphery and peripherality, covering issues of spatial protest, urban policy and urban planning.Discussing periphery as a political, social and spatial phenomenon and both a product and a process manufactured by power mechanisms, the authors show how …
Urban Ethnocracy: Ethnicization and the Production of Space in an Israeli 'Mixed City
In this paper we offer a critical analysis of ethnic relations in an Israeli 'mixed city'. Similar to other sites shaped by the logics of settling ethnonationalism and capitalism, the 'mixed city' is characterized by stark patterns of segregation between a dominant majority and a subordinate minority, as well as by ethnoclass fragmentation within each group. 'Mixed' spaces are both exceptional and involuntary, often resulting from the process of …
Neo-settler colonialism and the re-formation of territory: Privatization and nationalization in Israel
In this article we critically analyse the production of Israeli territory vis a vis the ongoing transformation of land and planning policies from ones based on pure nationalism to those purporting neo-liberal logic. Unlike the existing literature − including the most recent critical body of knowledge on planning, resource management and public policy in Israel − we contend that this transformation must be understood within the framework of settle…
Let Me Go to the City: African Asylum Seekers, Racialization and the Politics of Space in Israel
Journal Article ‘Let Me Go to the City’: African Asylum Seekers, Racialization and the Politics of Space in Israel Get access Haim Yacobi Haim Yacobi Department of Politics and Government, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, PO Box 653, Beer Sheva 84105, Israel [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Refugee Studies, Volume 24, Issue 1, March 2011, Pages 47–68, https://doi.org/10.1093/…
The Geopolitics of Neighbourhood: Jerusalem’s Colonial Space Revisited
This article will focus on an ongoing process of Jerusalem's contested urban space during the last decade namely the immigration of Palestinians, mostly Israeli citizens, to "satellite neighbourhoods", i.e. Jerusalem's colonial neighbourhoods that were constructed after 1967. Theoretically, this paper attempts to discuss neighbourhood planning in contested cities within the framework of geopolitics. In more details, we will focus on the relevance…
The urban geopolitics of neighboring: Conflict, encounter and class in Jerusalem’s settlement/neighborhood
This article examines a unique, yet paradigmatic, case study of a colonial neighborhood in East Jerusalem that is undergoing a significant demographic transformation.1 The French Hill neighborhood, built in 1971, was one of the first settlements in East Jerusalem. Initially, it was populated primarily by upper-middle class secular-Jewish residents. This group has been steadily diminishing as two other distinct new groups moved into the neighborho…
Planning a bi-national capital: Should Jerusalem remain united
Jerusalem’s Road 1: An inner city frontier
Road 1 is a four‐ to six‐lane divided carriageway that runs north–south through Jerusalem and separates Israeli and Palestinian sectors. We argue that this thoroughfare brings the frontier into the centre of Jerusalem while at the same time contributing to Israeli spatial continuity. In many ways, Road 1 functions like the bypass roads of the Occupied Territories, which may cause more long‐term damage than the infamous separation barrier, simply …
The NGOization of Space: Dilemmas of Social Change, Planning Policy, and the Israeli Public Sphere
This paper offers a critical analysis of the role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that deal with planning policy in general and in Israel in particular. The inherent dilemmas of the different NGOs' tactics and strategies in reshaping the public sphere are examined, based on a critical reading of Habermas's conceptualization of the public sphere. The main objective of this paper is to investigate to what extent, and under which conditions,…
Architecture, Orientalism and Identity: The Politics of the Israeli-Built Environment
This article critically examines the role of architecture in the construction of national identity. Through critical analysis of architectural representations, I study the interrelations between the production of the architectural object and the practice of construction of Israeli national identity. The existing body of knowledge that supports this article claims that the creation of national identity is a socially constructed process which invol…
Politics, infrastructure and representation: The case of Jerusalem’s Light Rail
God, Globalization, and Geopolitics: On West Jerusalem's Gated Communities
Over the last two decades West Jerusalem's city centre has undergone wide-scale privatization of space which is expressed, for instance, in the extensive construction of gated-community housing compounds. This is a global process which can be seen in many cities where neoliberal policies are implemented, resulting in the expansion of the elite's private capital on the one hand and the weakening of the welfare state as part of globalization proces…
Multiculturalism, Nationalism, and the Politics of the Israeli City
One of the central issues in the study of urban politics today is the fact that many cities have become multicultural arenas. The liberal viewpoint stresses the potential of the city—unlike other spaces—to offer many and equal opportunities for all residents regardless of religion, gender, or ethnic affiliation, but the critical body of knowledge highlights the ways in which the city, although apparently released from the shackles of nation- and …
Towards Urban Geopolitics
The political philosophy of the urban as a political and spatial entity emphasises the nature of cities “as places where strangers meet, remain in each other's proximity, and interact for a long ti
The architecture of ethnic logic: Exploring the meaning of the built environment in the ‘mixed’ city of lod – israel
This article analyses the evolution of the built environment in Israel's ‘mixed cities’ in Israel; sites shaped by the logic of ethno–nationalism, and characterized by patterns of segregation between the Jewish dominant majority and the Arab subordinate minority. The paper investigates the changes and dynamics of the urban landscape from the British Mandate period to recent times, focusing on the interrelations between ideology and architecture i…
Introduction: Infrastructural stigma and urban vulnerability
In this introduction to the Special Issue ‘Infrastructural Stigma and Urban Vulnerability’, we outline the need to join up debates on infrastructural exclusion on the one hand and urban stigma on the other. We argue that doing so will allow us to develop a better understanding of the co-constitutive relationship between the material and the symbolic structures of the city shaping urban exclusion and vulnerability. Positing that stigma is not mere…
Rethinking Cities in Contentious Times: The Mobilisation of Urban Dissent in the ‘Arab Spring’
Throughout history, cities have been the theatre of social and spatial struggles. The issue of urban protests, however, has not yet been investigated in detail in the light of the growing concern of the need to rethink urban studies, from theoretical and epistemic assumptions, to methodological issues. It is argued that the mobilisation of urban dissent in the so-called Arab Spring offers a good opportunity to develop a critical approach based on…
Jerusalem: From a ‘divided’ to a ‘contested’ city—and next to a neo-apartheid city
‘We, the sons and daughters of this land, are opening our doors, walking out into the streets and taking up positions in town plazas to declare: We are here.We are here to oppose evil, hatred and v
Beyond ‘causes of causes’: Health, stigma and the settler colonial urban territory in the Negev/Naqab
This article critically analyses and theoretically conceptualises the links between settler colonialism, planning and health. Based on the case of the Bedouin community in the Negev/Naqab, we argue that the production of settler colonial space has a profound impact on health, and should therefore be referred to as a specific category for analysing health disparities, simultaneously entangling territorial control and biopolitics towards indigenous…
Technopolitics, development and the colonial-postcolonial nexus: Revisiting settlements development aid from Israel to Africa
This article focuses on the interrelationship between colonial development in Israel and the export of knowledge and practices to Africa. We argue that at the core of the Israeli aid project to Africa is the Cold War and the global technopolitics of this era, that is, the use of technological methods and practices to achieve political ends. The main question to be discussed throughout this article is whether the Zionist settlement enterprise and …
Identity, Migration, and the City: Russian Immigrants in Contested Urban Space in Israel
This article deals with the way in which Russian immigrants identify with the Israeli national project, highlighting the process through which this identification occurs and its effect on the urban context. Our main argument is that this identification has arisen through interrelated processes including the ideology of the Israeli state and the history of settlement, the Russian social constructs of ethnicity and power, and local policies through…
Planning, Land Ownership, and Settler Colonialism in Israel/Palestine
This article discusses the challenges that the settlement process poses to Israeli property regimes, examining the ways that public apparatuses, specifically those related to urban planning, are creatively mobilized to address and mitigate such challenges. The article focuses on two case studies: the Palestinian village of Kamanneh in the Upper Galilee and the Ganey Aviv neighborhood of Lydda, one of Israel’s so-called mixed cities. Based on thes…
From 'Ethnocracity' to Urban Apartheid: A View from Jerusalem\al-Quds
In the core of this article stands an argument that while ethnocracy was a relevant analytical framework for understanding the urban dynamics of Jerusalem\al-Quds up until two decades ago, this is no longer the case. As this article demonstrates, ver the past twenty years or so, the city's geopolitical balance and its means of demographic control, as well as an intensifying militarization and a growing use of state violence, have transformed the …
Culture Capital for All’? Cultural Diversity Policy in Tel Aviv and its Limits
This article critically analyses cultural diversity policy in Tel Aviv–Jaffa in relation to non-Jewish labour migrant communities and to Palestinian citizens of Israel residing in Jaffa. It focuses on recent incorporation of cultural diversity into city policy in its 'City Vision' and 'Global City' initiatives and in three specific areas (festivities, libraries and museum of city history). The article argues that despite the introduction and init…
Cities in the Middle East: Politics, Representation and History
The geo-biographies of spatial knowledge: Regional planning from Israel to Sierra Leone and back
In-Between Surveillance and Spatial Protest: The Production of Space of the 'Mixed City' of Lod
This paper analyses the historical process during which the Israeli territory, including previously Palestinian cities, has been profoundly Judaized. More specifically, Based on Henri Lefebvre's conceptualization of the production of space, the paper focuses on the case of the 'mixed city' of Lod, accentuating the informal mechanisms of housing and infrastructure supply, the "strategic reversibility" of power relations and the struggle for identi…
The architecture of ethnic logic: Exploring the meaning of the built environment in the ‘mixed’ city of lod – israel
This article analyses the evolution of the built environment in Israel's ‘mixed cities’ in Israel; sites shaped by the logic of ethno–nationalism, and characterized by patterns of segregation between the Jewish dominant majority and the Arab subordinate minority. The paper investigates the changes and dynamics of the urban landscape from the British Mandate period to recent times, focusing on the interrelations between ideology and architecture i…
The architecture of ethnic logic: Exploring the Meaning of the Built Environment in the 'Mixed' City Of Lod - Israel
Planning a bi-national capital: Should Jerusalem remain united
A brief response to our critics”
Urban Ethnocracy: Ethnicization and the Production of Space in an Israeli 'Mixed City
In this paper we offer a critical analysis of ethnic relations in an Israeli 'mixed city'. Similar to other sites shaped by the logics of settling ethnonationalism and capitalism, the 'mixed city' is characterized by stark patterns of segregation between a dominant majority and a subordinate minority, as well as by ethnoclass fragmentation within each group. 'Mixed' spaces are both exceptional and involuntary, often resulting from the process of …
Form follows metaphors: A critical discourse analysis of the construction of the Israeli Supreme Court building in Jerusalem
This article examines critically the role of architecture in the construction of national identity, using the case of the Israeli Supreme Court building. Through critical discourse analysis of texts that accompanied the design and construction of this building, I propose to study the interrelations between the production of the architectural object and the practice of the construction of an Israeli national identity. The existing body of knowledg…
Cities in the Middle East: Politics, Representation and History
Jerusalem’s Road 1: An inner city frontier
Road 1 is a four‐ to six‐lane divided carriageway that runs north–south through Jerusalem and separates Israeli and Palestinian sectors. We argue that this thoroughfare brings the frontier into the centre of Jerusalem while at the same time contributing to Israeli spatial continuity. In many ways, Road 1 functions like the bypass roads of the Occupied Territories, which may cause more long‐term damage than the infamous separation barrier, simply …
Identity, Migration, and the City: Russian Immigrants in Contested Urban Space in Israel
This article deals with the way in which Russian immigrants identify with the Israeli national project, highlighting the process through which this identification occurs and its effect on the urban context. Our main argument is that this identification has arisen through interrelated processes including the ideology of the Israeli state and the history of settlement, the Russian social constructs of ethnicity and power, and local policies through…
The NGOization of Space: Dilemmas of Social Change, Planning Policy, and the Israeli Public Sphere
This paper offers a critical analysis of the role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that deal with planning policy in general and in Israel in particular. The inherent dilemmas of the different NGOs' tactics and strategies in reshaping the public sphere are examined, based on a critical reading of Habermas's conceptualization of the public sphere. The main objective of this paper is to investigate to what extent, and under which conditions,…
The EU and the Israel–Palestine conflict
The case study discussed in this chapter departs from the other case studies in this book as neither of the two conflict parties, Israel and Palestine, is geographically or, at least in the near future, politically part of the EU. Yet, while there is no immediate integration perspective for the two conflict parties, both Israel and Palestine have close linkages to the EU, both bilaterally and in the context of the multilateral Euro- Mediterranean…
Architecture, Orientalism and Identity: The Politics of the Israeli-Built Environment
This article critically examines the role of architecture in the construction of national identity. Through critical analysis of architectural representations, I study the interrelations between the production of the architectural object and the practice of construction of Israeli national identity. The existing body of knowledge that supports this article claims that the creation of national identity is a socially constructed process which invol…
The Jewish-Arab City: Spatio-Politics in a Mixed Community
Mixed city is a term widely used in Israel to describe areas occupied by both Jewish and Arab communities. In a critical examination of such cities, the author shows how a clear spatial and mental division exists between Arabs and Jews in Israel, and how the occurrence of such communities is both exceptional and involuntary. Looking at Jewish-Arab relations in Israel in the context of the built environment, it is argued that there are complex lin…
Multiculturalism, Nationalism, and the Politics of the Israeli City
One of the central issues in the study of urban politics today is the fact that many cities have become multicultural arenas. The liberal viewpoint stresses the potential of the city—unlike other spaces—to offer many and equal opportunities for all residents regardless of religion, gender, or ethnic affiliation, but the critical body of knowledge highlights the ways in which the city, although apparently released from the shackles of nation- and …
Towards Urban Geopolitics
The political philosophy of the urban as a political and spatial entity emphasises the nature of cities “as places where strangers meet, remain in each other's proximity, and interact for a long ti
Let Me Go to the City: African Asylum Seekers, Racialization and the Politics of Space in Israel
Journal Article ‘Let Me Go to the City’: African Asylum Seekers, Racialization and the Politics of Space in Israel Get access Haim Yacobi Haim Yacobi Department of Politics and Government, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, PO Box 653, Beer Sheva 84105, Israel [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Refugee Studies, Volume 24, Issue 1, March 2011, Pages 47–68, https://doi.org/10.1093/…
The Moral Geopolitics of Exported Spatial Development: Revisiting Israeli Involvement in Africa
This article will analyse Israel's past involvement (1956–1973) in Africa, in the context of a wider theoretical conceptualisation of the role of spatial development in the construction of moral geopolitics. Re-thinking the relevance of postcolonial critiques, the paper examines the political and institutional setup underlying Israeli involvement in development in Africa, documenting the scope of this phenomenon by looking at policy makers, profe…
Rethinking Israeli Space: Periphery and Identity
© 2011 Erez Tzfadia and Haim Yacobi. This book sheds light on the production of Israeli space and the politics of Jewish and Arab cities. The authors’ postcolonial approach deals with the notion of periphery and peripherality, covering issues of spatial protest, urban policy and urban planning.Discussing periphery as a political, social and spatial phenomenon and both a product and a process manufactured by power mechanisms, the authors show how …
Rethinking Israeli Space
This book sheds light on the production of Israeli space and the politics of Jewish and Arab cities. The authors’ postcolonial approach deals with the notion of periphery and peripherality, covering issues of spatial protest, urban policy and urban planning. Discussing periphery as a political, social and spatial phenomenon and both a product and a process manufactured by power mechanisms, the authors show how the state, the regime of citizenship…
God, Globalization, and Geopolitics: On West Jerusalem's Gated Communities
Over the last two decades West Jerusalem's city centre has undergone wide-scale privatization of space which is expressed, for instance, in the extensive construction of gated-community housing compounds. This is a global process which can be seen in many cities where neoliberal policies are implemented, resulting in the expansion of the elite's private capital on the one hand and the weakening of the welfare state as part of globalization proces…
Culture Capital for All’? Cultural Diversity Policy in Tel Aviv and its Limits
This article critically analyses cultural diversity policy in Tel Aviv–Jaffa in relation to non-Jewish labour migrant communities and to Palestinian citizens of Israel residing in Jaffa. It focuses on recent incorporation of cultural diversity into city policy in its 'City Vision' and 'Global City' initiatives and in three specific areas (festivities, libraries and museum of city history). The article argues that despite the introduction and init…
Rethinking Cities in Contentious Times: The Mobilisation of Urban Dissent in the ‘Arab Spring’
Throughout history, cities have been the theatre of social and spatial struggles. The issue of urban protests, however, has not yet been investigated in detail in the light of the growing concern of the need to rethink urban studies, from theoretical and epistemic assumptions, to methodological issues. It is argued that the mobilisation of urban dissent in the so-called Arab Spring offers a good opportunity to develop a critical approach based on…
The Arab village: A genealogy of (post)colonial imagination
This article critically discusses the image and the imagining of the Arab village produced by two cultures, the national-Zionist from the 1930s onwards, and the national-Palestinian during the last decade. Unlike fellow theorists and researchers, we are reluctant to be satisfied with the claim that throughout history the Jews, establishing their identity vis-à-vis the rural and oriental ‘other’, perceived the Arab village in an inversely mirrored…
The Geopolitics of Neighbourhood: Jerusalem’s Colonial Space Revisited
This article will focus on an ongoing process of Jerusalem's contested urban space during the last decade namely the immigration of Palestinians, mostly Israeli citizens, to "satellite neighbourhoods", i.e. Jerusalem's colonial neighbourhoods that were constructed after 1967. Theoretically, this paper attempts to discuss neighbourhood planning in contested cities within the framework of geopolitics. In more details, we will focus on the relevance…
Political science (38 works) · Sociology (37 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (34 works) · Law (32 works) · Politics (30 works) · Geography (23 works) · Law (23 works) · Political economy (20 works) · Middle East Politics and Society (14 works) · Archaeology (13 works)